For the past decade, there are significant progresses in medical research. The Human Genome Project had finished. For the first time in history, we have decoded over 20,000 human genes. The stem cell researchers have already safely injected stem cells into patients with neurodegenerative diseases and spinal cord injuries and they've seen the potential to vastly improve lives. MRI and other medical imaging technologies continuously improved, more and more advanced electronic devices, sensors, networking, data mining technologies are used in hospitals. Despite these great achievements, most of us still rely on once or twice annual doctor visits to get our physicals. None of these great technologies is used to monitor our day-to-day health status, not mention more sophisticated day to day health analysis and disease detection. Many people jokes that they know their cars better than their bodies. In many ways, it is a true statement. There are over 100 sensors on a modern car. On the other hand, the sensor to monitor our vital life is close to zero.
Meanwhile the rapid advancement of mobile Internet and smart phone has changed our daily life, and changed how the world operates in many ways. It also drives the semiconductor industry and related other industries to make the microcontrollers, various sensors and wireless communication chips very small with very low power consumption. Meanwhile, the prices of these devices drop dramatically in the past few years, which make them affordable to general public. However, how to take advantage of these latest technologies for medical use remains a challenge.
In the past, many body vital sensors have been developed. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 8,328,420, Abreu et al. disclosed how to measure brain temperature by wearing a special glass that embedded with sensors. But most of these sensors are designed to be used in a clinic environment. The size is large and cumbersome. In many cases, professional help is needed to put on these sensors, and large instruments are needed to collect the outputs. Recently, efforts have been made to use microcontroller with analog to digital convertors to digitize the traditional analog sensor outputs and transmit the results through wired or wireless network to a data-collecting center. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 8,323,188, Tran disclosed how to digitize the sensors input and transmit the result to remote server so that medical professionals, user's relatives can monitor the health condition of the user. After the booming of smart phone, new effort has been made to develop digital-watch kind of device, which can sense user's pulse, blood pressure, and other vital health data, and send these data through wireless network to a data-collecting center.
However, there are several drawbacks of the prior arts. Many of these sensors, like ECG, need to put multiple probes on different parts of the body. Some of them, like the ultrasonography, need to apply special gels on the body. In the clinic environment, with medical professional's guidance, they are fine. But for normal user's day-to-day use, it becomes inconvenient and sometime even not applicable. The next issue is how to amount the sensors on the human body so that the user can do long term monitoring without discomfort. It is preferable that the user can still conduct normal daily business during the monitoring. For general public day-to-day use, the sensors are not only affordable, but also cheap enough that the user can replace them in a short period. There are more challenges at the server side. Most of the prior arts and applications only use the server to collect data, and let the medical professionals to analyze the results and draw conclusions. This procedure can only be applied to the general clinic application with only hands full of patients. When there are millions of users start to upload their daily vital health data to the server, the process has to be automated.